Repoliticising the Future of Work: Automation and the End of Techno-optimism
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Publication Date
2022-03-04Journal Title
Journal of Cultural Economy
ISSN
1753-0350
Publisher
Routledge
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Manche, S., & Carbonell, J. S. (2022). Repoliticising the Future of Work: Automation and the End of Techno-optimism. Journal of Cultural Economy https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2022.2028651
Abstract
This review article of Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work (2020) and Jason Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work (2020) reads both works as an effort to repoliticise the question of unemployment, which has too often been ascribed to technological innovation, especially by proponents of automation theory. It places their works within current debates surrounding the question of automation and its political reverberations across the political spectrum. In the end, we show that the shortcomings of automation discourse reside in their economic analyses of the future of work and employment and that automation theorists encourage a depoliticisation of the question of employment through technocracy, while Benanav and Smith open the way for thinking about the future of work as a collective and social endeavour.
Sponsorship
Gates Cambridge
Embargo Lift Date
2023-08-01
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2022.2028651
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/332641
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